It is all obvious or trivial except…

Pretty good system really

Sandbu makes a fundamental error. He thinks liberal, democratic capitalism is what we have had for forty years. It isn’t. We have had anti-democratic financial capitalism that does not seek to make profit from meeting need but does instead seek to do so by exploiting weakness and arbitraging rules to extract rents where none are due. It is this that is rightly under threat, albeit the source of the threat is to be deeply regretted.

That’s the system which has just delivered, in these past 40 years, the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species.

I dunno about you but I consider that a success for a socio-economic system.

You need to appreciate how many liberals view increasing wealth in much of the third world with absolute horror. They theorize that socialism might be able to raise them to some level above scratch farming, and keep them there.

Umpteenth run-out for “we’re living in the greatest era in world history”. About 7O% of any global social improvement is down to socialism and the abolition of the slavery which got our system up and running, followed by good hearted ex- slaveowners investing their abolition compensation in factories where children were put to work in barbarous conditions.
I am unconvinced by the sudden benevolent interest in the far flung races of the world. In the UK the younger generation is back to slavery being tortured by extortionate rents and mortgage repayments in our well geared up rent seeking economy. Land of Hope and Glory mother of the Free.

@ DBS Reed
Slavery was abolished in England by the Saxon kings (egged on by the Church) nearly a thousand years before the seed drill, the spnning jenny and the power loom triggered the Industral revolution that transformed the world. Socialism had nothing to do with it.

@ SE
The Gulags in the USSR were slavery in all but name. Maybe DBC Reed thinks that the closing of the Gulags by the Russian Socialists got our system up and running (if you are a Doctor Who fan the time travel involved is acceptable)?